some of the books about the philippines, and
written by filipinos, that we brought from home

Please allow me to tell you a story about how one blog entry led to a project envisioned to make info about Philippine music and literature more accessible on the Internet.

One day in July 2001, Mark posted a press release on his personal blog. The press release was an invitation to a mini festival of Filipino contemporary short movies, which also mentioned Filipino authors and filmmakers.

This press release included the words short story and Rogelio Sikat, words that Mark couldn’t have imagined would be the subject of hundreds of comments on that post.

In the last 5 years, there have been 500 comments on that entry…and the only reason it stopped at that number was because Mark finally decided to close the comments section for that post. However, the emails still keep on coming. What kind of comments or emails? Here are some examples (verbatim):

“Fleas post the novel of Rogelio Sikat. Blood in d’Bukang Liwayway is the title,
I think. For Linzel and me. We are classmates. But she is always copying.”

“PLZZZ GIV ME AN EXMPLES OF TLMPTI, EPIKO, TLMBHAY, ANKDOTA,
PRBLA, MITOLOHYA, SABAYANG PAGBIGKAS, KWENTONG BAYAN…. TNXXX POH… PLZZZ!”

“bigyan ako kahit isang kwentong anekdota!!!!”

“plis send me 10 examples of filipino anecdotes..tagalog po!!and 1 maikling
kwento..pwede po pkicnd now na sa email ko..its urgent!!tnx alot!!muaaaahz.”

“plzzzzz.!!!!! pki paskil naman yung life story ni Rogelio R. Sikat Ineed it ka
si eh…..plz. cge n plz plz plz plz plz peassssssssse”

“NID KO PO NG 10 EXAMPLES NG EPIKO…RYT NOW…”

“Isang mapagpalayang araw sa iyo kaibigan….Nais ko
lamang pong humingi ng mga halimbawa ng mga uri ng maikling kwewnto.
Kung inyo lamang pong mamarapatin ang aking kahilingan, ito’y magsisilbing
isang malaking utang na loob. ito’y magsisilbing aking inspirasyon sa mga
susunod pang bukas. Pagpalain nawa kayo nang boung may kapal.”

I think you get the idea. In case you want to read the other interesting, and often desperate requests (sometimes demands) for help, you can view them here.

Honestly, at first I was only amused by the response…then perplexed…then saddened. Mark, too, became more and more disturbed by the sheer amount and urgency of the requests.

We began to wonder - was there no other place on the Internet that students could find this information besides a personal blog that clearly wasn’t about epikos and anekdotas at all? We searched, and found out that, apparently, there wasn’t much out there. For a long time, Mark’s post was the #1 result on Google when someone searched for “Rogelio Sikat”. Thankfully, that spot is now occupied by a Wikipedia entry, which gives some info about Sikat’s life, but really not much in the way of examples of his works.

THE PROJECT: WHY A WIKI?

On the 6th year anniversary of Mark’s personal blog, he decided to launch PINOYLITWIKI.COM and PINOYMUSICWIKI.COM.

These were inspired by the success of Wikipedia, and his idea was that it would be best to have a community effort to put these information online. While there are already efforts made by some people to do this, there is so far no central repository which points to these sites.

The purpose of the wikis is to have a place for people who are interested in Filipino culture to have a starting point in their search.

The goal is to be able to develop encyclopedic entries for Filipino writers, musicians, publishers, and their works. When these entries are mature enough, maybe we can then contribute these to Wikipedia for a wider reach.

To find out how you can contribute to these projects, please visit Mark’s blog entry about the project.

Posted under Helping , Reading